OCZ
has stated before that it delayed
its Vertex drives due to firmware upgrades. DailyTech
has now learned more details on why OCZ held back
shipments of its flagship SSD drives.

The latest firmware for OCZ's Vertex series boosts sequential
read and write performance, so much so that it can compete with Intel's
X-25E Extreme series on performance. However, the Vertex boasts a much
greater capacity and a much lower price.

The Vertex series, which
uses an Indilinx
Barefoot SSD controller, was originally specified at 200MB/s
sequential read and 160MB/s sequential write. However, OCZ's internal
tests show up to 250MB/s sequential read and 240MB/s sequential write
speeds.

These tests were conducted on an empty drive, and will not officially
be presented to consumers. However, it gives an indication of
how fast the final drives will be and allows some results to be
inferred.

While the firmware is responsible for a large part of the improved
performance over the introductory specifications, it is only because of
the hardware that it is able to work with. The 120GB and 250GB drives
have 64MB of DRAM cache and more channels to access its MLC NAND flash,
whereas the 30GB and 60GB drives only have 32MB of cache.

It should be noted that OCZ rounds down its capacities for several
reasons. Most storage vendors show capacity in decimal format, whereas
Windows show capacity in binary format. This means that the reported
capacity is lower than what is on the label.

Most SSDs also reserve
some capacity for redundancy in case of bad
sectors, and also for wear leveling. These reserved
areas may occupy up to five percent of an
SSD's storage capacity.